“People don’t want 50-50 leadership.”

Ohio Sec’y of State Ken Blackwell sounds like a man who bears watching.

Ken Blackwell has so many people worried because he represents a new political calculus with the power to shake up American politics. For Blackwell is a fiscal and cultural conservative, a true heir of the Reagan revolution, who happens to be black, with the proven power to attract votes from across a startlingly wide spectrum of the electorate. Born in the projects of Cincinnati to a meat-packer who preached the work ethic and a nurse who read to him from the Bible every evening, Blackwell has rejected the victimology of many black activists and opted for a different path, championing school choice, opposing abortion, and staunchly advocating low taxes as a road to prosperity. The 57-year-old is equally comfortable preaching that platform to the black urban voters of Cincinnati as to the white German Americans in Ohio’s rural counties or to the state’s business community.
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In a state where he’s often at war with his own party as well as the Democrats, Blackwell has developed a combative political style, sharpened by his quick wit. Drawing a clear distinction between his platform and that of one of his GOP opponents in the Ohio gubernatorial sweepstakes, Attorney General Jim Petro, Blackwell says, “Jim is the Al Gore of Ohio. He wants to reinvent government. I want to shrink it.”

Responding to GOP criticism that he’s too conservative to win in a “50-50 state,” Blackwell argues that “voters don’t want 50-50 leadership.”
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Blackwell is betting that many black Americans may be ready for a candidate, like him, who doesn’t preach victimology and doesn’t see the world almost entirely in racial terms. Blackwell is a post-racial, post-civil rights campaigner; race rarely enters into his speeches and is barely a part of his political platform. And even when Blackwell does address racial issues—the achievement gap between black and white students, for instance—it’s to tout free-market solutions like vouchers and charter schools. So far, this approach has resonated with black voters, attracting 40 to 50 percent of them in his statewide elections, even though he runs on the GOP line. And his strong support of Bush in 2004, analysts say, helped the president double his black vote in Ohio over the 2000 election. Bush won 17 percent of African-American votes in Ohio in 2004, compared with 11 percent nationally.

With that kind of track record, Blackwell has become a growing target of left-wing blacks like Jesse Jackson, aghast that the first black governor of a major midwestern state might actually turn out to be a conservative who doesn’t trade on race. Though Blackwell has yet to suffer the kind of indignities of Maryland’s Steele—pelted with Oreo cookies in his campaign appearances—black Democrats have dismissed him as an opportunist for joining the GOP and accused him of trying to “disenfranchise” blacks to help elect George Bush president. In the midst of the campaign, one Ohio Democrat compared Blackwell to a “children’s Transformer toy,” because he wore an Afro in college and today is a conservative. Jackson showed up in the state just before the 2004 vote and denounced “beneficiaries of our work engaging in election schemes to undermine the right to vote,” a reference to Blackwell’s role as the state’s chief election officer. Mindful that many people found it hard to swallow the notion that a black was disenfranchising other blacks, Blackwell shot back, “I am Jesse Jackson’s worst nightmare.”

Maybe, maybe. Maybe Hillary’s too, since Ken Blackwell is clearly not doing what all politicians do.

You’ll want to read Steven Malanga’s entire excellent profile on him.